


Living With the Knowledge

by thebookofnights



Series: Partially Stars [3]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), The Plot Thickens, Typical Night Vale Violence, Typical Night Vale Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:33:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebookofnights/pseuds/thebookofnights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos doesn't even have a definition of a "normal" day anymore, but even having left behind all of his old standards, he has to admit this day is particularly bizarre.</p><p>Not only is there a new threat to deal with in town, but he's made an enemy among the Sheriff's Secret Police, received notice that management is visiting for an unscheduled inspection, gotten a brand new car from... somewhere... and spoken to a being that he believed only hours ago couldn't possibly exist. </p><p>Not to mention his paranormal abilities are starting to spill over from his dreams into his waking hours. It's only a matter of time before someone notices.</p><p>So why not run with it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living With the Knowledge

_His mother’s cradlesongs aren’t like any other music he will ever hear in his life. They’re singular, each melody unique._

_He gets the idea that he is similar, in a way. Touched by an inner strangeness. Halfway to thirteen and already possessed of a thin, wiry alertness, he’s all half-buried edges — nose always in a book, voice always quiet and clipped and self-conscious, hair always too long. He’s like a ragged coyote cub trying to pretend to be a well-fed, domesticated puppy, and it doesn’t work._

_He sees things too clearly sometimes, and it frightens people when he doesn’t pretend to turn away. When he asks the wrong questions._

_Once he asked about his father, and that was the worst, the wrongest question of all, how much it hurt her. If that’s what a grownup’s love is like, then he doesn’t want any part of it. It would be worse than what their neighbors say, half-joking, half-not, about_ mal ojo _. (Carlos doesn’t believe in the Evil Eye. Like the concept of God, it can’t be properly pinned down. Besides, if it worked, Julio would be dead by now.)_

_But a child’s love is still acceptable, and that has to be all right, because he loves his mother more than anything._

_In Mexico she lived somewhere close to the sky. Here in L.A., the stars are made dim by the ocean mist that comes ashore in midday, by the lights of the city, by pollution. So she sings the stars to him in beautiful unbroken phrases, to put him to sleep. He’s always had trouble sleeping._

_She sits on the end of his bed and strokes his hair away from his eyes, and sings to him, and he watches her reflection in the mirror as he drowses off, safe and warm._

_Except this time, it’s different._

_This time he can’t see her face behind her own hair, and he knows she’s hiding from him, and that’s scary. Does it mean her face is hurt? Is she afraid to let him see? But why? Or is it his fault? Has he done something to frighten her? He tries to turn, but his wrists and ankles are both bound, and he’s not in bed but in a chair, sitting up, and he still can’t see her face._

_Half-past twelve is too old to cry, but he feels tears slipping down his cheeks anyway. His vision blurs and he can’t wipe them away, he can’t move his hands. His mother’s song is still there, but broken up now, skipping like a bad VCR tape, and he’s fighting his bonds, uselessly, feverishly._

_It isn’t time for her to die, she doesn’t die until he’s twenty-four; there aren’t even any symptoms of the cancer yet. Something is wrong here, the time is all wrong._

_He understands, with the sudden lucidity of all true nightmares, that he could do something to free himself, to save her from whatever is threatening her. He could make a promise._

_After all, he’s only tied up because he’s dangerous. And nothing is binding his mouth._

_He’s made such promises before._

_No, the Voice insists. No, no, no. Not like this. Not with the full knowledge of what he would be giving up. He must not give himself up._

_He thinks that the narrator of the dream is frightened. That’s strange. He’s never heard so much as a tremor in the Voice; even during descriptions of quite horrible things, nothing has ruffled its sonorous surface._

_He hesitates. Hesitates, and the bonds tighten cruelly —_

 

— and he opens his eyes and lies still, breathing shallowly, his entire body braced against restraints that are not really there.

Morning sunlight, diffuse and somehow clean, lies in stripes across the white emptiness of the bedroom. The only spots of color in here are the deep blue comforter, now bunched up around his waist, and the bright red pair of Converse sneakers he bought on a whim two days ago, sitting next to the open closet. He hasn’t unpacked yet.

It’s already better than sleeping on the perilous and rusty sofa bed in the lab — even in spite of the doors that sometimes creak open or closed by themselves. Time to read over his copy of the rental agreement again. He _thought_ he’d caught everything in it that seemed odd, but now he distinctly remembers getting up in search of water at 3:18, to find all the closets in the apartment gaping like the mouths of corpses, including several that he hadn’t noticed before.

Before he can cast around for his watch, or his glasses, there’s a noise from underneath the bed, a noise that seesaws from an electronic chime into a chopped-off shriek. Carlos jumps, reaching under the pillow for his heavy-duty pocketknife, before realizing what it is and relaxing again. He’s never going to get used to the iPad’s ringtone.

“Do you _mind?”_ irritably.

The iPad, crawling up onto the mattress, makes an apologetic chitter. Quickly, before it can ring again, Carlos taps the screen to answer the call. Unknown number. A little spike of adrenaline jolts him the rest of the way awake.

The phone number that his inconveniently sentient iPad has somehow appropriated is his _old_ number — the one he used in New York and on his trips to Massachusetts, to the tiny university there that had offered to fund his research project. Not either of his numbers here in Night Vale — the official one for the lab, or the private one for his cell phone.

Nobody’s supposed to _have_ the old number.

In fact, until just now, he’d been certain it didn’t work anymore.

“Hello?” he says, managing a courteous tone. How many hours of sleep has he had? More than usual? Fewer? What time _is_ it?

“Good morning, Carlos.”

The voice is flat. Unfamiliar. Featureless. A man’s voice, but he can’t gather any other data from it. No accent of any kind. Like a voice produced by a computer program, except that he can hear breathing on the line, faint crackling in the background. No, not a recording.

“May I ask who’s calling?” He firmly keeps hold of his courteous tone, despite the stealthy undercurrent of fear creeping into his stomach.

“You may call me the Director, if you need a method of address. My title changes, depending on the situation. Think of me as a program coordinator. The head of the department. Management, so to speak.”

Carlos sits all the way up. “I don’t... Sorry, I don’t understand. Management of what?”

 _“Your_ management. More specifically, management of your research team, and its... eventual goal.”

“You’re with Manuxet, then?”

“ ‘With’... Oh, no. I wouldn’t describe myself as ‘with’ anyone,” the voice muses. “But I see what you are asking. No, not the university. I represent, in the present moment, the _backers_ of your research grant. Those who would like you to succeed.”

“I see.” Grimly. He stands up, bare feet cold on the carpet. Looks down at the call display, frowning. “And how do I know you are who you claim to be?”

“You were given a password. I saw to it.”

Carlos is silent. Without his glasses, everything more than a few feet away is blurred, murky. He folds his arms, trying not to feel trapped. Then, “A password...”

“Yes. I’m sure you remember. I will be in Night Vale at 4:30 this afternoon. When I arrive, you will recognize me by that password.”

“Why all the secrecy?” Carlos asks abruptly.

“Don’t play the fool,” the voice replies, still utterly calm. “You are under surveillance. You have been watched ever since you first began to make the connections you are building your theories upon. Since before you were even aware they were anything more than coincidences. Without secrecy, you would be dead now. Your colleagues — Phil Kirk, Marianne Smithson, Dave Halland, young Eli Hirsch — they would be dead now. Night Vale is _watched._ Night Vale _watches._ No. Don’t pretend to misunderstand me. I am the contact you were told to expect.”

“And you’re coming here... why?”

The answer is baffling. It’s also chilling in its unexpected simplicity.

“To conduct your first inspection.”

 

He sits in the living room and drinks warm, flat soda, all the carbonation leached out of it by exposure to the air. Runs his fingers, lightly, absently, over the surface of the coffee table, the secret drawer where two highly illegal notes, both written by hand — one in ink, one in some substance that defies chemical analysis — lie hidden.

His digital watch shows 7:45, time separators flashing serenely and steadily, like the light on the radio tower.

He wonders if Cecil is still asleep somewhere. Wherever it is he lives. In a house or an apartment somewhere in Old Town, he guesses, someplace where the history of Night Vale is almost palpable, an invisible weight, something you could measure if you only had the right instrument. Asleep, at peace, not yet troubled by the burdens of wakefulness.

The mental image he flashes on makes him shudder: Cecil with the early-morning sunlight turning his hair to white fire and his tattoos to a smoldering black map, binding lines to contain the slow deep energy of his Voice, the broad-shouldered, wiry strength of his body. Glasses askew, one mobile, long-fingered hand holding a place in a half-open book, features unwontedly softened in sleep. It’s so clear that Carlos can make out the book’s title ( _An Intermediate-Level Guide to Constellations and Portents_ ), the color of the bedsheets (dark red), even the symbols inked into the hollows of Cecil’s wrists (left, the Seal of Solomon; right, a sign he doesn’t recognize enclosed in a circle, something like a branch with three lines radiating out on one side and two on the other).

There — vivid and present and impossible — for one aching second. Gone the next. Only flesh-colored darkness behind his eyelids now, and what the _hell_ had that just been?

He can’t pretend he hasn’t been daydreaming about the magnetic, maddening, often terrifying owner of the Voice, but never in such impossible detail. His _memory_ can give him mental images with startling clarity, sometimes, but never his _imagination_ — not even on the subject of Cecil Palmer.

Is he going to start having the dreams while he’s _awake?_

“Oh, please, fuck, no,” he says aloud. Presses the heel of his hand to his eyes.

Decides he needs something stronger than caffeine.

 

His battered, more-than-slightly-chewed cell phone (it’s impossible to keep the iPad from gnawing on it — along with its six retractable legs, the iPad has also grown a tiny, sharp maw where its charger port used to be, not to mention a worrying 2.8-level paranormal energy field) starts beeping at him, indicating voicemail, just as he steps through the door of the dreaded convenience store on Third and Elm. He picks up right away, glad of the excuse to avoid the clerk’s hollow-eyed stare.

Two saved messages. The first seems like it’s just accidentally recorded background noise — one of the other scientists putting their phone in their pocket again and then sitting on it? Carlos wonders — and then Phil’s voice becomes audible: “Boss, if I were you, I’d get a restraining order, or something. That’s really all I have to say on the matter. The others are all reacting in a _most_ unprofessional manner, and what they do in their off-hours isn’t — _excuse_ me, I’m on the _phone,”_ as a clattering sound echoes into the receiver. “What they do in their off-hours isn’t my business, as I said, but they’re pretty drunk, and — well, just, I thought I should warn you. What? _Invisible_ pie? There is no such thing as invisible — here, let me see that menu —”

The call clicks off abruptly. Carlos blinks. Eases, as politely as he can, past one of the hooded figures looming at the exact center of the main aisle, shivering at the noticeable drop in temperature that radiates out from its black, wraith-like robes. What had that been about?

He tries the second message.

It startles him into dropping his change; the clerk, who has already retrieved a box of cigarettes, waits with no diminution in the intensity of her glower as he scrabbles awkwardly after the coins.

Cheekbones flaring brightly with embarrassment, Carlos doesn’t even bother to wait until he’s all the way out the door, just sticks a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and shoulders the phone to light it as he walks.

8:02.

 

He hasn’t wanted so furiously to get lost in a long time.

Night Vale’s too small, of course. He can’t literally lose himself, unless he’s stupid enough to keep walking out through the scrublands and into the Sand Wastes until they swallow him whole.

The jeering voices of his friends — not unkind, not quite that, but still, drunk and laughing at him: _hey, perfect Carlos, with your perfect hair, how come you didn’t tell us you had a boyfriend?_ — hit a dangerous nerve. The fact that he should have been expecting it, come on, he should have been expecting it from day _one,_ does nothing to soften the impact.

He smokes the cigarette down to the filter. Burns his fingers with an absent curse. Tries to ignore the vicious echoes of schoolyard fights in his memory. The churning in his gut. The way his hand wants to clench up. The hard white point of heat under his solar plexus, the exact mathematical center of something in him that _likes_ the violence, something that still revolts him.

He doesn’t spend even one moment in contemplation over the still-unsolved puzzle of why cigarette smoke always turns as red as dragonfire in the air of this strange desert town.

He’s not sure how long he’s been walking.

The long, slow curve of Main ahead of him like a mirage, a reverse image of the route he drove when he first arrived in Night Vale. Little sand-devils play about his feet, tug at the hem of his labcoat. It’s windy today. He lengthens his stride, trying to look as though he’s going somewhere specific.

Past the used car lot, with its alarming block-lettered signs _(WE WILL NEVER BE UNDERSOLD ON PAIN OF RITUAL SACRIFICE)._ Past a cluster of uninhabited-looking trailers, dust-eaten paint on their flanks and empty flowerpots half-hidden by their steps. Past an unexpected Queen Anne-style cottage, surrounded by palms, with a wide, shadowed porch —

“Young man!” a clear voice calls to him. “Will you come help me with this?”

He turns, confusion giving way to courtesy when he recognizes the woman standing on the porch. Josie _(old woman Josie,_ the Voice echoes in his head, with affection), famous around town and on Cecil’s radio show for talking to angels. She’d told him about her supposed celestial visitors herself when they had been introduced. _Halfway_ introduced, that is — she had already known his name. Thanks to Cecil, of course, and he’s still angry about that... but her welcoming smile is a relief.

Angels can’t be real, of course, but he can’t help liking Josie.

She’s holding a flowerpot, this one with a very spiny, blue-green cactus growing from it, and beaming at him. She’s small and slightly bent with age and quite beautiful, in the way so many elderly people are, with all of her years mapped out on her face in kindly wrinkles. She reminds him with stunning force of his _abuela,_ María — a resemblance that still stops just short of eerie, no matter how many times he runs into her.

Today she reminds him, too, of his own mother, although the time is all wrong. His mother never lived to map that many years.

“Oh, no,” she says as she catches sight of his face. “Carlos, dear, this won’t do. You mustn’t walk out near the scrublands without a destination. Not after you’ve been having nightmares. Please, come inside; I’ll give you some tea.”

He obeys mechanically, startled.

Then, when he steps from the sidewalk to her yard, _something_ appears in between them.

Nearly ten feet tall. Radiant. Humanoid, but skeletal to the point of emaciation. Wings that cast a thunderous cruciform shadow as they unfold — feathered, or scaled, or both, he can’t quite tell. No indication of biological sex, not even in the bone structure. Black skin, pure black like ebony, with a fierce, sourceless black light lying against it, impossible and breathtaking.

Carlos stops, hit sharply by that all-too-familiar submerged sensation of hallucination. Knows, at the same time, that he’s not hallucinating.

It opens eyes the color of nothing he’s ever seen. Eyes on its head, eyes on its wings, eyes on its elongated torso.

It holds his gaze.

Then it nods. _You’ll do,_ it says.

“W-what?” he whispers.

 _You don’t understand yet. You are caught, caught between what you know, and what you don’t yet know that you don’t know._ Tossed in the gyre of that burning, soundless voice, the words are more poetry than paradox.

“I... don’t...” Are tears rolling down his face? Or are his eyes melting? He’s at the edge of a panic so profound that if he gives in to it, it will obliterate his mind.

 _Do not fear. Do not fear the things that walk the face of this earth,_ it says. _You do know this: You may die at any moment, but you may also_ live _at any moment. Do not fear_ yourself, _Carlos. Do not fear your power. Live with the knowledge._

“Live...?”

 _Live,_ sighs the angel, like a command.

Then it’s gone, disappearing as if it had never been, leaving behind a silence which is unlike any other silence he will ever hear in his life. It’s singular, each moment unique —

_— like cradlesong —_

— a silence so total that he can almost hear atoms colliding.

He breaks it by swallowing hard. Josie is watching him gravely, still holding her cactus in its pot.

He wipes the tears from his face, laughs unsteadily, looks up at her with streaming eyes.

“Th — th-that — it changed your _lightbulb?”_ he manages.

She smiles reassuringly down at him. “Oh, yes, indeed. And also fixed the squeaky hinge on the bathroom door.”

“Of — of course it did.” Carlos stifles another laugh, afraid that it will devolve into hysteria. Follows her to the door.

 

He sits in Josie’s kitchen, her old-fashioned lace tablecloth brushing his knees, the sagebrush-scented steam of her tea wafting into his face. She notices his tears, but says nothing, only bustles about in front of the stove, tidying, her long white braid coiled over her shoulder.

Carlos says, “Angels...” and his voice hitches and he puts his head down on the crook of his arm.

“Drink your tea, young man.” Josie is stern. “You’ve been working too hard. And excuse my rudeness, but that haircut is _terrible._ You didn’t do it yourself, did you?”

“No,” choking on a tiny laugh. “No, I, it was odd, more like a kidnapping than a haircut. I was just walking down the street. My hair was getting too long anyway, so I didn’t mind. I think that guy was desperate for customers, I... didn’t want to disappoint him,” he finds himself explaining. Sips the tea, relaxing fractionally as the warmth of it uncoils some of the tightness in his chest. “He said something about an expired contract.”

“An expired... oh _dear,”_ Josie says. “You didn’t stay long, did you? Or take anything of his with you?”

“No...”

“Good. I won’t say anything uncharitable about scientific temperament, but that was very reckless. You should never come between someone and a promise they’ve broken. It’s dangerous.”

Carlos stares down at the green, peaceful surface of his tea, like a tiny forest pool between his fingertips. “I’ll be careful,” he says, and then, “Miss Josie?”

“Yes?”

He bears down hard on the fragile handle of the teacup. “What... what _am_ I?” and his voice is very clear in his own ears. Quiet and clipped and self-conscious. “Is there... something wrong with me?”

She sits down next to him, immediately, taking his free hand. “Oh, Carlos, dear, of _course_ there’s nothing wrong with you. Whatever would make you think such a thing?”

“I’ve been... having nightmares... and I _hear_ things, I _see_ things. Like your — your angel. I heard it in my head. I’d think I was just going crazy, but... do you remember the Glow Cloud?”

Josie nods. “Of course I do, that pestilent thing. You were very brave, to chase it away.”

His hand jerks involuntarily with the shock, but she keeps hold of it, her fingers wrapped around his. “You _know_ about that?”

“The angels told me about how you saved us. How you saved Night Vale. I wasn’t able to leave my home, at the time... they protect it, you see.” Her smile is sweet and blinding. “They’re very considerate houseguests. The lightning did damage one end of the fence a little, but it was getting ready to fall down anyway, so I don’t mind.”

“And did the angels also tell you about my nightmares?”

“Dear me, no! They would never invade your privacy like that. I’m afraid I assumed,” she says. “I know the look. I’ve seen it in my mirror often enough. It’s a hard thing to bear, being different.”

“You said...” He swallows hard again. Hangs his head. “You said there was nothing wrong with me.”

Josie tilts his chin up with two fingers, exactly as Grandma María had always done, blue eyes glinting like azurite. “So I did, and I meant it. ‘Different’ is not ‘wrong,’ Carlos. Listen to yourself! What _are_ you? You’re a _person._ You’re not crazy. You’re not sick. Well... you’re _likely_ to be, someday, if you don’t stop smoking those nasty cigarettes, but you’re old enough to make your own decisions about _that.”_

He can’t help laughing a little. “I... I’m trying to quit.”

“That’s good.” She brushes his tears away gently with the back of her hand, cool and rough from working in the yard. “There, now, I know I’m scolding; sometimes I feel like this town gives me its people, to make up for the children I never had. No,” forestalling his inarticulate noise of apology, “it’s no trouble, dear. You needed a little advice. I can see you’ve been having a hard time of it.”

“It — it seems I keep asking the wrong questions,” ruefully.

Josie’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Yes, you’ve been asking questions,” she says. “Whether or not they’re the _wrong_ questions is much less important than whether or not they’re the _right_ questions.”

“I’m sorry,” and Carlos shakes his head. “I just don’t understand.”

“That’s all right,” serenely. “You will. Now drink your tea. It’s nearly 10:00, and your friends will be waiting for you.”

 

On the way back to Third, he walks slowly, hands in the pockets of his labcoat.

Josie’s unexpected sympathy — not just sympathy, but _informed_ sympathy, and he hates to think of her having nightmares, but no one has ever _understood_ that still-new, still-raw part of his life before — was the catalyst for some much-needed emotional reaction. He feels better, somehow. Relieved. Still edgy, but not as fundamentally hurt as the voicemail message left him... and not as guilty over the uncountable past insults it dredged up, either.

It’s easier to breathe.

The new coffee stand near the Ralph’s has just opened for the morning, and he slips into line behind a tall woman carrying a bookbag and wearing one of the loose tunics that seem to be standard attire for about a quarter of the town’s population. Marianne, better at small talk than any of the other scientists, has elicited the information that they’re considered traditional, formal wear, linked in some way with the Olden Faith. What exactly the Olden Faith is, none of the scientists have been able to discover.

Cecil could explain, if he were here. Cecil, in fact, would probably _love_ to explain. He’d perch on the nearby bench and lean forward, expound intently about the history of Night Vale’s religious traditions. Maybe break off to run distracted fingers through his hair in search of the perfect adjective — or to return the greetings of passersby he would undoubtedly know by name — or even just to look up at Carlos and lose the thread of his discourse for a moment, smiling...

As if he’s summoned the Voice just by indulging in this short, sweet daydream, it becomes audible, the radio at the coffee stand fading from music and into the first segment of the show. They’ve started early today.

“The _Night Vale Daily Journal_ has announced that they will be cutting back their publication schedule to Monday through Thursday only, ‘due to the economic downturn and a massive decline in the literate population.’ ” Carlos can clearly imagine Cecil with his head tilted to one side, quoting a press release, deadpan and with one eyebrow raised. “The Thursday _Daily Journal_ will now be called the Weekend Edition, and on Sundays, newspaper kiosks — usually filled with important newsprint — will be filled with two-percent milk. When asked, ‘Why milk?’ the Journal’s publishing editor, Leann Hart, said that ‘it is important that we maintain an unbiased approach to news reporting.’ ”

The undercurrent of irony in this last is subtle, but unmistakable, and Carlos is startled into a laugh. Whether or not Cecil chose that particular quote with malice aforethought, he can well believe Leann Hart provided the radio host with the ammunition. He’s formed no very high opinion of the editor’s intelligence, despite her organization’s disturbing ability to deliver newspapers by some kind of teleportation. (He hopes the new Sunday edition will not be delivered by the same method; it would be a pain in the ass if they missed the kiosk outside Big Rico’s and filled the badly-paved loading zone of the lab with milk instead.)

Both the barista and the woman with the bookbag, who is now holding a drink buried under so much foam that the coffee is all but invisible, turn to look at him, puzzled, when he laughs.

“Hey,” the barista says, turning down the radio. She’s wearing an outfit that’s halfway between punk and a style that’s entirely unplaceable: studded piercings, half-shaven head, a black leather jacket with a number of large holes cut at odd, but very precise, points in it, and furry white pants. It’s fetching, in a bizarre way. “Hey, you’re the scientist. Your hair really is —”

“Terrible? I know,” he cuts her off, hoping it comes out sounding casual. “Don’t worry. Even the worst haircut can’t last forever.”

“It’s Carlos, isn’t it?” He must have done all right, because the barista’s just smiling at him. “You’re all the way over by Big Rico’s, right? What are you doing out here?”

He shrugs. “Morning walk. Miss Josie was kind enough to give me some tea, but my blood-caffeine level’s running low.”

“I can fix that. Whatcha want?”

“Surprise me. Something without turmeric or metal shavings. And no foam, either, please.”

“Cinnamon okay?” At his nod, she grins, starts working the espresso machine. “After the first cinnamon-intolerant customer, you start _checking._ I had this one guy actually turn blue.”

“It happens, with bad allergic reactions. Lack of oxygen —”

“Cerulean,” the barista continues. “Or do I mean periwinkle? Anyway, I thought it was a nice color, but he said his wife hated blue, and she’d be pissed at him for forgetting.”

“Oh,” rather blankly. “Uh, that’s too bad,” and he glances at the tall woman, who hasn’t moved. She gives him a preoccupied waiting-at-the-counter smile, digging in her bag for something. “I could hold that for you, if you like,” he offers, gesturing at her drink, but before she can reply, all hell breaks loose.

Something _inside_ the bag fluttering convulsively, like a heart, like a trapped bird. A snarling, ripping noise. A scream from the woman, pulling her hand free of the bag with something clamped to it. Something with cruel teeth. Blood flung out in an arc.

 _“Down,”_ Carlos barks from behind the arm he instinctively threw up, just in time to protect his face from the spray. The barista — obviously a Night Vale native — doesn’t need to be told to hide twice.

The injured woman staggers, falls to her knees, somehow still holding her drink, sobbing in fear. “Get it off,” she moans, “it’s _biting_ me!”

It’s a large book. Locked onto the woman’s hand like an animal trap.

Carlos has only a moment in which to decide gloves aren’t worth the time they’d take to put on; the pair in his pocket is just disposable nitrile, not the heavier PVA gloves from the lab, and they might make his grip too slippery.

He goes for it barehanded. Seizes it by the spine, hoping it won’t decide to grow spikes. Or secrete some kind of contact poison.

It makes a terrifying, shrill noise and tries to round on him, a bloody nest of teeth that _can’t_ be paper, paper isn’t that _sharp_ — but as soon as it lets go of its victim’s wrist, Carlos brings out his other hand from his pocket. Flicks the metal lighter to life. The book flaps again, trying to get away from the sudden flame, and he throws it to the pavement, stamps it closed quickly, and leans his weight on it. Thank goodness it’s a paperback.

He can feel it trembling furiously under his shoe, trying to get away.

It smells distinctly of raw meat. Also, it appears to be producing saliva.

What the _fuck?_

“Hold your hand up,” he tells the woman. “Above the level of your heart. Put pressure on the wound. _Yes,_ you have to set your drink down, you need to hold it with your other hand. Tightly. It’s all right to come out now,” he calls in the direction of the counter.

The barista pokes a cautious head up. “You think?”

“Yes, as long as I don’t move. Do you have a first aid kit back there, or any clean towels? This is a deep bite. We need to call emergency services, right now.”

“Okay.” The barista leans out, in the direction of a brilliantly flowered bush growing at the edge of the parking lot. “Ambulance please,” she stage-whispers, “hold the helicopter.” Then, returning to a normal tone as she pulls out an impressive-looking metal box with _FIRST AID/DECONTAMINATION_ stamped on the cover, “What about your order, Carlos? I’ll have to start over, if you still want it.”

Carlos sighs. With the twist of a smile, “What’s your name?”

“Abby.”

“Abby. Thank you for your help. Make it a double, please. I’ll be sure to recommend your place next time my research team’s feeling sleepy.”

“Hey, on the house,” she says cheerfully, handing a towel to the bleeding woman. “Anything else you need?”

He closes his eyes briefly. Can’t help asking. “What time is it?”

“10:42.”

 

“You need a _what,_ boss?”

Eli’s hangover, Carlos thinks with satisfaction, must be hammering on the inside of his skull; his consonants are slightly blurred, as if he can’t quite remember how his tongue works. Good.

“A catch pole. The kind Animal Control uses. If we don’t have one, make one, if you think you can do it in less than an hour. Or just call them.”

“Call Animal Control? Ugh, Carlos, you know who their new semi-permanent liaison is,” complains Eli. “Shit, we’re barely on work hours and you want me to talk to Officer Ben of the Sheriff’s Secret Police? He’s so sore about the demotion that I’m surprised his new flunkies don’t mistake him for a bear. Besides, a net gun would work better.”

“I don’t have time to argue that point. Just get me a catch pole. And a cage. Mesh would be best, I think. And bring those tasers Dave thinks I don’t know he has, just in case.”

“Bring them where?”

“Northeastern edge of the Ralph’s front parking lot. Flint Drive and Second.”

“What, you’re not meeting us at the lab?”

“No. I can’t move until you get here, so hurry, please. And make sure everyone knows not to touch, open, or get close to any books. In fact, give all printed material a wide berth until we figure out what’s going on.”

“Okay,” clearly mystified. “Um, why can’t you move? Have you cornered it, whatever it is?”

He looks down at the book, still pinned under his foot and now emitting a low, hair-raising growl. “You could say that.”

“Aren’t you going to give me three guesses? It’s only fair.”

“No time for that either,” curtly.

A pause. “Oh shit,” in a small voice. “Did we actually call you last night?”

“You actually did.”

“Crap. Listen, we were just playing around, it was a joke, we didn’t realize you’d be this upset, Mare’s gonna kill me —”

 _“And_ you’ll be officially late for work in another seven minutes, so move your ass, Hirsch.” Relenting, slightly, as the intern subsides into a huffy silence, “Don’t worry, I’ll cover for you at the inspection.”

“Inspection? There’s an inspection? Who’s inspecting us?”

“Management, apparently,” and Carlos grimaces. “The backers, anyway. I don’t think I’d look like a good continued investment with one or more limbs missing, so please just _get here_ before my leg muscles stop working.”

“Okay, all right,” and he can finally hear the scrabble that means Eli is getting ready to leave. “I’ll call the others first. Maybe you should call the radio station,” and he hangs up before Carlos can retort.

 

It’s tempting.

He hovers his finger over the entry for the NVCR switchboard in his cell phone’s directory. Hesitates. Then drops his hand, lets the screen go dark.

Self-reliance, one of his only virtues — a virtue he’d better work on redeveloping.

 _You’ll do._ The angel’s voice, still clear and scorching in his mind. He shivers.

 

“You’re telling me that book did this?” The EMT looks too young for his blood-splashed white coat and hard, knowing detachment. They always do — New York or L.A., Birmingham or Hillsboro, Cedar City or Providence. Night Vale is apparently no exception. For some completely perverse reason, this is comforting.

“Yes,” Carlos says, “but I don’t recommend taking it with you. I want to study it. We’ll get it, uh, contained; you can call us if there are... complications, and maybe we’ll have discovered something useful by then.”

The EMT shakes his head, wrapping a cloth bandage around the dressing he’s applied with absent dexterity. “Carrying a book around with you like that, that’s dangerous,” he scolds his patient. “What were you thinking?”

“Well, you know,” in a thready voice, “you wake up from the Library, you’ve actually got something checked out that’s approved by the City Council, so you think you might as well, right? It’s not like they _usually_ bite. Can I have some of my foam latte now?”

“No metal shavings right after losing so much blood,” the EMT says sternly. “You shouldn’t even be ordering drinks garnished with metal shavings in the first place, considering that you were born with pain-sensing nerves.”

“I suppose I’m just used to it,” defensively. “I mean, forty-seven percent of Night Vale’s population have pain-sensing nerves. It runs in my family.”

“Yeah, mine, too,” Carlos says wryly. “What did you mean about waking up from the Library?” The injured woman and the EMT both look up at him, perplexed. “I’m new in town,” hastily.

 _“Oh,_ of course, you’re the scientist,” the EMT says, snapping his fingers. “I thought you seemed familiar. Have you not been to the Library yet?”

“No...”

“Well, you get there in your sleep. You just... wake up there. It’s like dreaming, except that you can check out books, and when you wake up in your own bed again they’ll be on your nightstand or your dresser or whatever. It can cause advanced disorientation, and in some cases epilepsy, but it’s how the system’s always worked.”

“I _did_ wonder why the building had no entrance.”

“Oh, that’s not because of the astral travel,” the EMT says, “it’s to keep the librarians from getting out. Put us out of business in Emergency Services if the whole town got devoured at once.”

_Right._

 

Abby the barista seems undaunted by the necessity of maneuvering around Carlos and the book in order to continue selling coffee, but he’s apologized twice anyway by the time the cavalry arrives.

“Hey, you’re a celebrity,” she says. “If I’m your preferred brand, Brewed Awakenings will become the most popular coffee shop in Night Vale.”

“I’m a celebrity, am I?” He regards her with tired amusement. “Are you sure you don’t mean I’m notorious?”

“That’s definitely a Cecil word, isn’t it?” She looks up from wiping the counter clean to wink at him. He’d be irritated with himself all over again if it wasn’t such a distracting mental image — it’s entirely too easy to imagine Cecil saying _notorious._ The slight pause beforehand for portentous effect. The slight emphasis on the second syllable. The slight tilt of his mouth in that private smile.

He’s saved from the need for an intelligible reply as a bright red Prius pulls up to the curb and Eli promptly half-falls out of the passenger-side window to wave — Transformers T-shirt, curly hair standing out in a static corona, hopeful grin. “Hey, boss! We got what you asked for, but, uh... there was an unfortunate stipulation attached.”

“An unfortunate stipulation?”

“Yeah.” Phil, in the driver’s seat, jerks a thumb over his shoulder to indicate a Secret Policeman, in dress-down fatigues today, squashed in between Marianne, Dave, a laptop, and something in a heavy canvas bag. _“That_ unfortunate stipulation.”

Officer Ben reacts with only a slight frown to this unflattering form of address. He’s wearing his impassive on-duty expression. Not a good sign.

This is going to be tricky.

“Good afternoon, Officer,” in the voice that he uses for thesis defenses or confronting five-headed dragons. The voice that he’d once daydreamed about being able to summon, half-past twelve and always hiding bruises. An _I dare you_ voice — blue steel under a layer of deceptive mildness.  “It is afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Almost,” says Marianne, leaning one arm out of the open window. “11:52.” Her freckles are vivid against her clammy, pale skin. Her head must be aching too, Carlos realizes. This wasn’t just a few drinks after work hours; his three colleagues obviously went out and got righteously smashed. That’s not a good sign either.

“Well, get out of the car and help me, if you don’t mind,” still mildly. “That means I’ve been standing on this thing for more than an hour.”

The book renews its growl as the car doors open, and Eli recoils instinctively. “Holy shit! Are those _teeth?”_

“It certainly looks like it. That’s _amazing,”_ Dave says, wrestling good-naturedly with the laptop. He’s in better shape than either Marianne or Phil, just a touch of grayness to his dark brown skin, his hair undisturbed in its neat cornrows. _(You want perfect hair, you ought to be looking at him, Night Vale, not me,_ Carlos thinks.) “It’s obviously developed some form of self-awareness, or at least an appetite. Just like your iPad. Does it meet the criteria for the Theory of Cohesive Intent?”

“Can’t apply all of them without allowing it to move on its own, you know that.” Phil sounds rather smug as he hits the trunk release; he’s the only one not nursing a hangover.

“It looks like it did,” Eli points out. He’s vibrating with his usual energy, despite last night’s alcohol overdose. “It must’ve bitten somebody. And you’ve got blood all over your coat again, boss. You might have _some_ consideration for those poor bastards at the laundromat. Or for me, now that we have a washing machine.”

“Oh, hush.” Marianne, propping herself absently against the car with one hand, walks around to the trunk to retrieve the catch pole. She tosses it to Carlos before Officer Ben can protest.

He puts up a hand and takes it out of the air, despite the residual shakiness in her aim. Places the loop of the wire carefully on the ground, right up against the book. Lets up on the pressure, too quickly. The book snaps free, that broken-off sound like ripping paper.

He stumbles. Yanks the wire tight, at the last second. Lets out a ragged breath of relief.

Reflexes. Since arriving in this town he’s lost five pounds, established what’s likely to be a permanent sleep deficit, and all his reflexes, already on too fine a trigger to begin with, have tautened. Sudden noises don’t just make him jump, they make him _react._

If someone ran a psych profile on him now, what would they find?

He decides not to examine that thought too closely. Holds the book up on the end of the pole instead, a grotesque, slavering trophy. It’s making a faint metallic grinding noise as it fights to open its jaws against the wire noose.

“You should’ve let me do that,” Officer Ben says, exasperated. He’s extricated himself from the new-smelling interior of the Prius, fatigues wrinkled, riot baton tucked under his arm like a riding crop.

Carlos, whose entire right leg is now locked up in agony, just lowers the pole. Eli and Marianne both move to take it from him. Eli gets there first. Abby, curious, steps around the counter to join the group.

Freed of his burden, Carlos turns, limping, to confront the Secret Policeman. “I hope you don’t mean to confiscate it,” he says, trying for a soft, reasonable tone. “It’s not technically a matter for Animal Control, is it? It’s not an animal.”

“I can _see_ that, Carlos the Perfect Scientist, I’m not fucking incompetent. I can tell that’s a book, even if it _is_ obviously broken.”

Firmly putting down his impulse to stiffen up at the word _perfect,_ he stops, tilts his head to one side in confusion. “What do you mean, ‘broken’?”

“It’s not functioning correctly, is it? You can’t read it,” slowing down his delivery as if addressing a child, “therefore, it’s not working the way books are supposed to work. That’s what you _call_ a household object that stops working. _Broken.”_

“Well,” Carlos replies, a glint of buried steel emerging again in his voice, “a simple broken household object really seems... beneath the notice of the Sheriff’s Secret Police, doesn’t it?”

 _“Nothing_ is beneath the notice of the Sheriff’s Secret Police, and you had better not forget that. _Any_ of you,” swinging around with a glare that makes the other scientists and Abby all step back.

Carlos doesn’t move. The muscles in his leg are trying to convince him that they’ve been replaced by hot coals. He focuses on Officer Ben’s eyes, instead: they’re blue and piercing, the eyes of a veteran bully... but they’re rimmed with red, the flesh just underneath them sagging from weariness.

Something is wrong. Something that’s running him ragged.

“I don’t know for certain yet _what_ you’re doing,” and Officer Ben leans forward into Carlos’s space until their foreheads nearly touch, into their locked gaze — the all-too-familiar looming gesture of intimidation that goes naturally before an assault of some sort, and for a crazy moment Carlos imagines a kiss rather than a blow — as if that wouldn’t be even more loathsome. His hand clenches up again. “But,” Officer Ben continues, “I _will_ find out. You think right now that you can slip it under my radar, that it really does have something to do with analyzing broken books, or playing around taking surveys of the town. As if every kid old enough to be in school doesn’t know it’s impossible to _map_ Night Vale. Well, that’s fine. Just remember, when I _do_ catch you, that it was always inevitable. As inevitable as the slow breakdown of every system in your body. As inevitable as death. Remember _every fucking word I said,_ scientist.”

Carlos is momentarily silent. He doesn’t realize he’s smiling until the Secret Policeman actually flinches back from him. He doesn’t think his expression is in the slightest soft or reasonable anymore, but he doesn’t care. His smile widens, lips skinning back from his teeth. That bright hard anger is back, a white point of heat buried under his ribs.

“I won’t forget,” he says.

 

The drive back to the lab is cramped. A hybrid coupe, however stylish, is not a vehicle that seats five people in comfort. Especially when all of them are keeping an ear bent in the direction of the trunk, where the book in its mesh cage is already throwing a fit, causing occasional alarming clanking or thumping noises.

“Wow, showdown at high noon, that was epic,” had been Abby’s comment as they left; she had given Carlos a friendly thumbs-up and a cup of Mexican-style coffee, heavy on cinnamon and spices. He savors it slowly, only breaking off to massage the still-screeching muscles of his leg with his left hand.

“You can drive, next time, of course,” says Phil. “I just thought you’d appreciate being off your feet.”

“I do, thank you. What possessed you to rent a car this size, anyway? I mean, it’s great for the environment, but it can’t be practical — what happens next time we end up with a big load of equipment?” He looks up to find them all regarding him curiously. “What?”

“We thought _you_ chose it, boss,” Dave says.

“I don’t remember sending a memo,” and Carlos smiles — they know how much he hated the official rigmarole of inter-departmental emails back in New York — but their curious looks only intensify.

“Um, we didn’t rent it. It — it showed up. The keys were on the table in the lab, on top of some sort of shipping invoice.” Eli makes a face. “I _hate_ it when people waltz right past the security system. Now I have to stay late to work on it again. I still think, if you’d just let me incorporate some of the things they use here —”

“No.”

“But it’d be such a good way to test —”

 _“No,_ Eli. We’re not playing games with our security. Do something that makes it partially paranormal, and it could go feral. Everything else around here apparently does, and we don’t understand the... the mechanism yet. Besides, I’m still not convinced the practitioners of this ‘dark magic,’ or whatever they’re called, aren’t just deluding themselves, thinking they can actually control a force like that.”

Eli subsides, crossing his arms, but Marianne steps in, returning to the original subject: “Boss, you really didn’t request this car? We thought it must be a replacement for your old one. The paperwork had your name on it.”

“Did it?” Carlos muses. “Did it really? And what else?”

“Well — nothing.” In the rearview mirror, he sees her frown thoughtfully. “Nothing useful. A lot of tracking and code numbers. The only one I recognized was the routing number for our grant account. No shipping address, or anything.”

“Sinister, how it just... showed up,” says Dave, but Eli gives one of his contagious shouts of laughter at this.

“If it were a _hearse_ it’d be sinister. A luxury Cadillac, or a stealth limo, or even just an exact duplicate of the boss’s old car, broken seatbelts included — any of those would be sinister. But a bright red Prius? You can’t get any Stephen King out of _that.”_

Carlos shakes his head. “I’m afraid I have to agree with you there, but it’s still very odd. I never even submitted any paperwork... so how did they know my old car got totaled?”

“Maybe they saw it happen,” Eli says, soberly.

No one laughs.

 

In the lab, Carlos sets his black box in the center of the table and turns it on, the signal for a secret meeting. They don’t activate the anti-surveillance devices now except in cases of emergency, and only at very irregular intervals, hoping that Night Vale’s many watchers will chalk it up to problems with their equipment.

“Listen carefully, because I have to be quick,” he says. “I got a call this morning from someone who refused to give his name. He told me he’s — uh, ‘representing’ was the word he used, I think — the backers of our research grant.”

“Did he say anything about the car?” Marianne crosses her arms.

“No. It was a very short conversation. He only said enough to convince me.”

 _“How_ did he convince you?” Eli, skeptical.

Carlos sighs. Puts down his coffee cup. “When I went to give my pitch over at Manuxet University, they told me they didn’t need to hear any speeches, they already had an offer for me. The head of Special Projects there — do you know him, Marianne? You were right in the same neighborhood as an undergraduate.”

“I worked with several people from the college, sure, but in archaeology, not in Special Projects. Although... Yeah, no, wait, I think I’ve met him. Professor... Alden?”

“Alders, James Alders.”

“Right. Alders, yeah. He seemed okay. A bureaucrat, but not a slimy one.”

Carlos nods. “He was the one who arranged everything. He’d read my papers, of course, and some of Phil’s, but he didn’t seem interested in the rest of you. I thought that was odd... well. He said a lot of odd things, which I don’t have time for now. The point is, he gave me a password.”

“A password?” Phil puts his hands on his hips, clearly impatient. “What the fuck is this, _Mission: Impossible?”_

“More or less what I said. But he was really emphatic about it. I wasn’t to know who was funding the grant, and if they ever had to contact me, for reasons yet to be specified, they’d give me this password.”

“So the guy who called this morning, he gave it?”

“Not yet. He said he’d give it to us when he got here.”

Dave sits down, a prudent distance from the mesh cage. _“Here_ here? Like Night Vale here?”

“Yeah. 4:30 this afternoon.”

“So that’s what you meant about an inspection!” Eli looks pleased with himself. “Don’t tell me, he sounded really skeezy on the phone?”

“Let’s say he sounded like a potential problem.” Carlos glances around at their faces and is steadied — their expressions are all known quantities to him, various mingled levels of weariness, curiosity and trust. Undeserved trust, perhaps, but trust, nonetheless.

“So what is the password?” Marianne asks.

“The word Alders gave me was ‘mirage.’ ”

Phil snorts. “Because _that’ll_ never come up in unrelated conversation. Not in the middle of the _desert.”_

“Oh, even worse,” Carlos laughs softly, reassured. “It’s the name of the project, apparently — he called it ‘Operation Mirage’ at least twice.”

“I suppose it’s at least better than ‘Operation Oasis’ or ‘Operation Tumbleweed’ or ‘Operation Large Pile of Sand,’ ” sardonically. “Or even ‘Operation Basilisk Tornado.’ ”

“Hey, man, I don’t care how many times you decide to be a dick about it, ‘Basilisk Tornado’ is still the best name ever,” Eli says. “I could name my band that and I’d be a rock star without even learning how to play an instrument. ‘I’m with the band — you know, _Basilisk Tornado,’_ and pow! Instant groupies. It’s like an event horizon of coolness.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Phil says, rolling his eyes at the others’ laughter.

Dave recovers first. “Okay, so what is it we need to know, boss?”

“Just. I don’t know. Be ready,” Carlos says. “The man who spoke to me — he called himself the Director — he said that the secrecy was for our protection, that we’d all be dead now if they weren’t taking care on our behalf. Well, I don’t buy it. And I don’t fucking like it, either.”

Eli clasps his hands together, theatrically. “It’s so great when you talk like a mafioso. If the lab gets eaten by sandworms or something, you could hire on at Big Rico’s to deliver pizza and bullets.”

Carlos rolls his eyes. “I’ll keep that in mind, in case we ever end up in a David Lynch movie. Does anyone have any actual concerns to express about all this?”

There’s a short silence. Mischief is playing around Eli’s mouth; Marianne looks troubled; Dave is smiling faintly. Finally, Phil — who’s been staring at the growling book in its cage, as if it has devoured the secrets of the universe and might at any moment vomit them up for detailed inspection — says impatiently, “Are we going to just stand here, or are we going to do science?”

Carlos huffs a short, but heartfelt, sigh of relief. Picks up the black box. “Okay, someone start a sentence.”

Promptly, “Your hair looks totally _perfect_ this after —”

“Preferably a sentence that will _not_ result in the high-speed application of a metal ruler to the side of your head, Eli.”

The intern pouts, and Carlos grins at him, and suddenly, just like that, they’re all right again, and the others are laughing.

 

It’s 3:11 when his phone rings.

Unknown number.

He knows it can’t be Cecil — at this hour Cecil must still be in the recording booth, and besides, Cecil’s private number would show up on his phone now, thanks to his own besotted stupidity for not erasing it again once he’d made the gesture of putting it in. But, hastily peeling off his gloves to pick it up, he still hopes for the Voice on the other end.

 _You can’t be homesick, not when you’re_ at _home,_ he thinks at himself, without processing how jumbled the thought is.

Out loud, over the humming of the centrifuge and the snarling of the book (which reacted with extreme ferocity to having samples of its cover taken), he says, “Hello?”

“Hello... Carlos?” A man’s voice, vaguely familiar, taut with apprehension.

“Yeah, can I help you?”

“I hope so, I r-really need help,” stammering. “T-there’s — I know it’s probably r-rude of me, this isn’t your work number, is it? But I couldn’t find the damn business card, and — a-and I think someone’s _dead_ by now —”

“Slow down,” and his tone makes the others turn, Eli backing away from the cage and Phil looking up from his clipboard. “It’s Steve, right? You came by my lab, the day of the Glow Cloud. I know you. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I n-need to _warn_ someone,” Steve Carlsberg almost moans, “and the radio station w-won’t even take my _calls_ —”

“Slow. Down,” Carlos repeats, sharp and imperative. “Where are you?”

“Work. My office — under the desk. Carlos, I hear — I hear screaming —”

“Don’t _listen_ to it, then, pay attention to me. How do I find the building? What’s the _address?”_

“Corner of Old Musk Road and Seventh. Edge of the Cactus Bloom neighbor — wait. You’re not going to fucking come over here, are you? It’s dangerous — the Secret Police even laughed at me...”

Carlos’s hand is trying to clench into a fist, for the third time today. “What? Why did the Secret Police refuse to help?”

“I don’t _know..._ the guy just said it wasn’t their jurisdiction and I should call you if I wanted to waste my time...”

 _Officer Ben. Of course._ Carlos laughs himself, mirthlessly. Nods. “In that case, I’m absolutely going to fucking come over there. It’s a book, isn’t it? What’s it doing?”

“M-more than one book, actually, and they — I think at least one of them can breathe poison. I saw it, a green cloud... and sparks...”

“Gas masks,” Carlos says over his shoulder, and Eli nods and dives into the supply closet. “How will I recognize the building from the outside?”

Dully, “I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that.”

 

The building is on fire.

There’s a distinct lack of sirens or alarms, and when Carlos pulls the Prius to a halt at the curb opposite, they see a couple of pedestrians frown in distaste and simply jog from one side of the street to the other. “Shit,” Eli says.

The fire isn’t large — it only seems to be affecting one corner of the building — but it makes them all stare for a moment, the stupefaction natural in people confronted with the sudden blossoming of a disaster.

Carlos shakes it off first. Physical flames are not as daunting as the mere sight of the angel in Josie’s yard had been. If he sheds tears now, they’ll just be a reaction to the smoke. He can handle that.

He pulls on the gas mask. “Okay, Eli, you’re going to stay here —”

“But, _boss_ —”

“— stay here and call the fire department. If it doesn’t work, do that fire-department-summoning thing Big Rico showed us. There’s chalk and candles in the other backpack. If _that_ doesn’t work, drive to the fire department and raise hell until they come back here. Got it?”

“I got it,” Eli says, whining forgotten. “Push over.”

“In a minute. Marianne?”

“I’m here,” she says, voice steady. “You want one of these?” She holds up the taser so he can see it, casually competent, no trace of a hangover by now.

“No. Not yet. I want my hands free.”

Marianne nods, gives him a small smile in the rearview mirror. “I know the feeling,” and she pulls her own mask on.

“Autobots, roll out!” and Eli grins.

 

Inside, they can see the flickering orange light of the flames spilling from a half-open door. The overhead fluorescents appear to have gone out.

The sound of slowly ripping paper floats to them on the first spirals of the smoke, and Marianne chokes back a noise of fear, brings up her weapon. “I think that’s... how they sound when they’re... _feeding,”_ she says. “I’m shooting on sight, boss, and if they get me, I’m really fucking sorry about that phonecall last night.”

Carlos, absurdly touched, puts a hand out to squeeze her shoulder gently through the heavy-duty material of his glove. “Don’t give yourself up for lost yet,” he says. “If they’re like the one I caught, they hate fire, and we’ve got plenty of that here. Destroy them, if you don’t have another choice. I... um. I’m bad at this, explaining —”

“I already know,” she cuts him off. “I know you’re gay. It’s okay. Really. I think Eli guesses. The others, I don’t think so, but they won’t _care,_ Carlos, it’s not like we’ve all suddenly converted to hardcore religions or something.”

“You — how _long_ have you —?”

Marianne sighs, exasperated. She glances briefly at him, without giving up her cautious stance. “I don’t even remember anymore. I didn’t say anything because I thought maybe... your family...”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t see them much. Look, can we talk about this after work, Mare?”

“ ‘After work’ — oh God, what is my life?” She tosses her braid over her shoulder, smiles at him from behind the mask, and then moves cautiously forward.

Carlos follows, sweeping a look around for the door of Steve’s office. He sees several doors, all closed. Thinks about starting for one. Then another of those somehow awful thick tearing sounds splits the air open and he focuses grimly on their target again.

Marianne kicks the half-open door wide and then jumps back, training the taser on the threshold. Nothing happens. She inspects the wall next to the door, looks at Carlos. He nods agreement, and she steps into the room, sidelong, putting her back to it. He follows again, cautiously.

The far wall of the office is burning brightly. They’re both breathing hard with mounting fear, unspeaking, in case the noise might attract the things.

Directly across from them, as if spilled carelessly onto an altar, a woman’s body lies on a desk, still dressed in a business-style skirt and jacket, bright blue high-heeled shoes on its feet. Most of the head and parts of the torso are missing.

The living books look like huge butterflies as they feed, opening and closing their covers like jaws, like wings. Three of them have battened onto the corpse, and a fourth, issuing sparks, lurks on the floor between those dangling feet.

The two scientists exchange quick looks, for once perfectly comprehensible to each other — Marianne: _Thank goodness for rubber-soled workboots,_ Carlos: _I’m going in_ — and they move with purpose toward the desk, giving each other a wary margin of space.

Marianne takes time lining up her shot. Carlos doesn’t blame her, but he knows before she fires that it won’t be a miss. He’s seen her at an archery range, seen her throwing rocks. Her instinctive aim is precise and unforgiving; her shaky toss of the catch pole earlier in the afternoon had been thrown off by dehydration, not nerves. He wonders how much his choice of his team members was influenced by their talent for survival — Eli’s uncapped well of energy, Dave’s quiet clearheadedness, Phil’s unconscious asceticism.

He’d at least known they would need to survive. He can’t entirely absolve himself.

“I’m sorry,” Marianne breathes to the dead woman, and then she fires.

It’s a perfect hit, and it’s ugly: the body is galvanized, hands and feet seized by wrenching, lifelike tremors. Little arcs of electricity lick around its fingers. Blood sizzles. The three books atop the corpse all shudder, nailed in place by the voltage.

The fourth moves as if flung by invisible hands, arrowing straight for Marianne’s legs, growling.

Carlos, who has been waiting, dives to intercept it.

Curls his fingers into its nest of paper teeth and slams it against the floor. Realizes, when it fastens uselessly onto his glove-protected hand, that he’s growling back. He takes a more firm grip, rolls to his feet, and then throws it as hard as he can, against the burning wall. Its dying wail is indescribable.

“Hit it one more time,” he yells to Marianne, and she squeezes the trigger again, sends another electric pulse, another shockwave to knock the feeding monstrosities onto the floor, where they can be kicked into the fire.

 

When the screaming, flapping things have been finally muffled by the weight of their own ash, Carlos goes looking for a fire extinguisher. It’s probably too late, but he’s at least going to try. Coming back into the half-engulfed room, he finds Marianne sitting on the floor, well below the level of the smoke piling slowly onto the ceiling, still holding the taser.

“Boss, look at us, we’re _Fahrenheit 451_ over here,” she says. “I’ve never felt less guilty about burning a book.”

“Knowing this town, they’d probably make us civic heroes,” says Carlos, helping her to her feet. “If we told anyone, that is.”

 

“Night Vale radio station; you’ve got the switchboard.” A voice he doesn’t know.

“Have I?” Carlos is bemused. “Uh, sorry. I was expecting Chad.”

“Oh dear. I’m so sorry. We just got confirmation... he’s not coming back. You’re not... family, are you?”

“No, just — just an acquaintance. You’re telling me he’s dead?”

“Yes, we’re about to announce it on air. I mean, I’m new, I wasn’t really — I didn’t know Chad that well.”

“So Cecil... did he go home for the day?” Carlos looks across the street, to where Eli and Steve Carlsberg, who is huddled in a trauma blanket, are involved in some kind of argument with the fire chief. The flames have been smothered, and the fire hoses have smudged the complicated chalk circle in the center of the deserted road.

“No, of course not!” The board operator sounds surprised. “It’s contract renegotiation day. Anyway, Station Management would never give us time off merely for the loss of an intern. I’m told Chad went honorably, in the line of duty. He was investigating the discount sporting goods store on Flint Drive, you know, the one we’re now quite certain is a front for the world government?”

Stunned, “You sent him _there?”_

“It was Management’s decision. Cecil wanted to go himself — but I shouldn’t talk about that. What did you want to tell him about?”

“It depends,” cautiously. “Does he know about the books?”

The board operator’s voice brightens. Familiar ground, apparently. “Oh, the ones that are broken? Yeah, we’ve been getting some calls in about that. Not sure if he wants to chase it.”

“Just warn everyone not to touch or open any books until we’ve figured out the nature of the problem. It’s opening them that... seems to agitate them.”

“You want to be quoted as a source?”

“I don’t want to be quoted at all. Just tell him we — the research team — are studying one of the books to see if we can figure out what’s going on here.”

“Really? You think you can?”

Carlos lets out a breath. _I think I_ have. _Just one more question._ Aloud, he says, “I don’t know. But thank you,” and hangs up, quickly.

 

It’s a question he doesn’t get to ask.

Marianne comes back out of the office building as he crosses the road to rejoin the group. She holds up empty hands in a shrug, indicating no more books hiding inside, then smiles expectantly, pushing her mask up. He shakes his head.

“You didn’t get through?” she asks. “You didn’t talk to Cecil?” and the others all turn: the fire chief puzzled, Eli hopeful, Steve still with dried blood clinging to his chin and his sideburns.

“Chad, the intern at the radio station — he’s dead.”

“What?” Marianne’s eyes harden. “How? Was it the — the thing _in_ the station?”

“You mean Station Management?” Steve laughs bitterly. “Of course it was. It’s always hungry. Sure, they die out somewhere in town, but they’re really _sacrifices._ It’s always arranged. You’d think Cecil would stop it, but he never considers anyone but himself —”

“That’s _enough,”_ Marianne interrupts.

She had kept calm throughout their bizarre, near-silent assault on the feeding books. Throughout the fire department’s arrival (still with no Secret Police accompaniment). Even while watching the mutilated body of the unfortunate woman carried out on a stretcher. But now, something, some flicker of pain in Carlos’s face, makes her wheel around to confront Steve, blazing with temper.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your inflammatory _nonsense,_ Steve Carlsberg! So you don’t like Cecil — well, that’s fine, from what I hear he doesn’t like _you,_ either — but accusing him of fucking conspiracy to _murder?_ That’s _slander,_ God damn it, and I bet you don’t have a _shred_ of evidence, either!”

“I... um... no, I...”

“I _thought_ not, so you can fucking shut up until you have something _logical_ and _substantiated_ to say. Okay?”

“Okay,” weakly.

 _“Bravissima!”_ Eli laughs, applauding so enthusiastically that the firemen join in. “That’s right, Mare, show ’em how it’s done!”

“And you can shut up as well,” she adds, but in a softened tone. Turns to look up at Carlos, holds out her hand. “Boss? You all right?”

“Yeah. They’ll deliver the warning, at least. We’d better call the lab next, Dave and Phil are probably going crazy over —” He glances at his watch, then stops. Stares at the time.

“What is it?” Eli asks, but his voice seems to come from somewhere very far away.

4:29.

 

It rolls in like a wave, and the worst part about it is that he can _see_ all of it.

He can’t hear it, the way he heard the Glow Cloud and the chanting of the people who had fallen under its influence. He can’t hear words at all. This time there are no voices, not even the one, vital Voice that narrates his dreams. He can see all of it and it’s absolutely soundless.

It starts out on the edge of town, with someone Carlos recognizes vaguely. Larry something, a short man in spectacles with a nervous Southern accent. He’d asked Carlos some question, at the town meeting. One of Cecil’s contacts, he’s been mentioned on the radio, and here’s the obvious reason why — his house is perched on the bluff overlooking the sweep of Route 800 and the Sand Wastes to the south, like a guard on the periphery of an armed camp.

Despite the magnificent view from his front yard, this man doesn’t see the old-fashioned black sedan that slides up the throat of Exit 10 like a streamlined pill capsule. He’s too busy doubling over in a mortal panic.

Terror slips smoothly into Night Vale, like a mist rising in the wake of the black sedan, as it drives up the same road Carlos walked, just this morning, as if erasing all evidence that he’d ever been there.

The employees of the car lot all crouch down behind their gleaming barbed-wire barricades, rolling their eyes up at the sky as if they expect predatory birds, or helicopters, to swoop down and carry them away.

At the edge of Josie’s yard, shafts of black, humming light. The glint of eyes. The glint of blades. The glint of wings that might be feathers, or scales, or both, interposed like edged shields. Scalding, glimmering voices: _do not_ and _do not fear_ and _it walks, it walks._

Shoppers in the Ralph’s parking lot stop in their tracks, the parents among them aching to reach for their children and yet unable to move. Abby the barista — already shedding quiet tears of sympathy for Chad, lost in the line of a noble duty — just leans over onto the counter of the coffee stand and buries her shaking face in her hands.

All over town doors slam shut, windowshades go down, people Carlos doesn’t know fall to their knees in their yards, or on the sidewalk, and stare blankly into nowhere, and none of them see the black sedan as it floats sedately along Flint Drive.

It passes the turnoff to Third, where Dave and Phil stand facing each other across the table in the lab, hands frozen on their equipment, words frozen on their lips.

It passes the turnoff to Fifth, where the station is unlit except for the blinking red eye at the top of its tower, and the broadcast has faltered for the first time in years, and Cecil _moves,_ even though his expression is that of a man certain any movement will be his last, to crumple the printed announcement of the intern’s death between chilled, desperate fingers.

It turns on Seventh, and beside Carlos the fire chief and his men let out rattling, horrified breaths, as if they feel an invisible ceiling coming down on them, and Steve Carlsberg whimpers and pulls the trauma blanket tighter, and Marianne and Eli fasten desperately onto each other’s hands like children lost in the woods, and none of them see the black sedan as it drifts to a stop in front of the half-burnt shell of the office building.

As the door opens.

 

“I am aware,” the Director’s voice issues lazily from the yawning dark interior of the car, “that you’re still able to move, Carlos, so don’t bother to pretend paralysis in the futile hope that I will go away.”

He stares.

“Come, come, you don’t think I went to all this trouble to arrange for you to study Night Vale in the first place, only to have you killed? And in the car, too, when it’d be easier just to _order_ your death and not bother with the cleaners? Be sensible. Get in. This’ll only take a few minutes — from your perspective, at least — and they won’t remember a thing.”

“You won’t hurt any of them?” Carlos’s voice feels a thousand years old, rough with disuse.

“My business is with you. Get in.”

He thinks about picking up the taser, just taking it out of the pocket of Marianne’s labcoat and pointing it at the maw of the open car door. Nailing the source of that nondescript and yet still somehow smug voice with repeated bursts of electricity. Would the Director be able to continue irradiating the whole town with some kind of psychic horror after 50,000 volts directly to the face?

He resists the temptation, but only because he’s unsure of the answer to that question. Keeps his hands at his sides. Walks forward, surprised to discover he _can_ walk, in spite of the Director’s words.

“Okay,” and suddenly he’s smiling, remembering what Eli said about the qualifications for sinister vehicles earlier. The Director’s car, he’d probably agree, is textbook sinister. “You’re gonna make me an offer I can’t refuse, huh? Drive me up to the top of Red Mesa and show me all the cities of the world — or at least the one city that matters? Let’s do it, then. Anything that’ll get you out of town faster. Because I have to tell you, it’s not big enough for the two of us.”

There’s a pause, then, “I don’t understand those references, but the meaning seems quite clear. Of course, you’re anxious to have me gone...”

“And you knew I would be, which is undoubtedly why you came here yourself,” and Carlos crosses his arms. “I was skeptical on the phone, wasn’t I? But go ahead, give me your _bona fides._ What’s the password, Director?”

A sigh. It’s not a very human sigh — it sounds like the scrape of scales over rock, like the abrasion of a rock canyon under a mourning wind — but it does manage somehow to convey irritation.

“The password is a thing I am not, man of measurements; the password is ‘mirage.' I hope you have not committed the error of believing that this is a dream because it refuses to _be_ measured.”

Carlos just smiles again. He knows it isn’t a dream; he has the perfect yardstick for knowing it isn’t a dream — and now he’s certain that the Director can’t read his mind, which is a considerable relief. With studied gravity, “I have not.”

“Get in, then.”

Carlos gets in.

He’s gotten into cars like this before. At least there’s no gun pointing at his head this time.

And for now, at least, he can ignore the part of his mind that is echoing his dream, repeating the heartbreaking memory of the Voice in distress: _not like this, not like this, no, no, Carlos, not like this._

 

The inside of the black sedan does not fulfill any of his unthought expectations.

It takes his eyes half the length of their first circuit of Ouroboros Road to adjust to the level of darkness caused by tinted windows and a fine-grained dark cloud in the air — he can see its particles, like bits of ash or mold spores, and struggles to keep his breathing even — but when his vision clears, there’s no futuristic-looking machinery inside, and nothing obviously paranormal, either.

50,023 miles on the odometer. One of those plastic dashboards meant to look like wood. Two men, expressionless, sitting in the back seat with seatbelts creasing their otherwise immaculate suits. _There_ are the guns, and badly hidden, too, but at least they’re still not pointed at him. It’s all startlingly normal.

 _We need to develop a unit of measurement for normality,_ he thinks. _With a simplified scale, from one to the discovery that you’re some kind of fucking telepath,_ and he chokes on laughter. Breathes it back out harshly.

“If you’re experiencing stimulant cravings,” the Director’s voice intones from beside him, “go ahead. My employees are not bothered by smoke, poisonous or otherwise.”

Carlos hesitates, then takes the pack from the pocket of his labcoat, taps out a cigarette. Offers it, between two fingers, to the man driving the sedan. “Polite of you,” ironically. “Want one?”

“No, thank you. My needs are provided for.”

He shrugs, flips his lighter open, calmed fractionally by the little _chink_ as it strikes. Breathes in the fragrance of the smoke, trying not to think about what else he might be breathing in. He doesn’t feel like he might be under any unknown chemical influence... at least, not yet.

“So tell me,” glancing at the Director’s profile, “how exactly are you going to inspect my team, now that you’ve driven everyone in town blind with terror? I’m not really an expert... but I’d have sent someone else.”

The Director smiles. It’s a hideous smile — just a stretching of muscles, a baring of teeth. As if he’s taken Internet classes on how to mimic human expressions, but failed to grasp some essential part of the lesson.

“I _did,_ in fact, send someone else,” he says in his self-satisfied monotone, “but Night Vale has a tendency to make people from the outside disappear. This man — perhaps you met him? Frank Chen was his name — I sent him in, and he never came back out. After a week or so, without so much as a phonecall, or the least remnant of a severed finger, to inform me of his continued existence, I decided it would be better to visit in person.”

Another drag on the cigarette. Carlos holds this one a bit longer, hoping that his recognition doesn’t show on his face. “I hope you’re not going to accuse me of murdering him?”

“If you had murdered him, you would have been the one to get in touch with me, isn’t that true?”

“I didn’t know you existed until this morning.” His voice is shaking, in spite of his best efforts. “And I’ve never murdered _anyone.”_

The Director shakes his head, dismissively. “Oh, well, you _would,_ under certain circumstances... but I gave Frank instructions not to trigger any of those circumstances. No doubt he thought it odd; most people do. But you, Carlos, I imagine you will have more insight than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not here to inspect your team. I’m here to inspect _you.”_ The Director’s eyes fix on Carlos’s face. They look like the eyes of every middle manager Carlos has ever met, noncommittal and deliberate. They also look like pinpricks that something horrible is using to look through, like holes in a sheet, and he can’t help thinking _mal ojo,_ wanting to make some kind of warding sign, even though he knows it’s useless superstition.

He says nothing for a moment. Then, “Do I pass?”

“Yes and no. It isn’t that kind of inspection. I really would have preferred not to conduct this conversation in English, it’s never specific enough... but my native tongue, so to speak, would most likely prove too difficult for your fragile sanity.”

“That’s a bit insulting,” mildly. “If my sanity hasn’t run screaming after six weeks in Night Vale, I wouldn’t call it fragile.”

Another of those empty smiles. “Everyone has their anchors. And you are — _hung up?_ — is that the term? I really do find that poetic — on notions of justice and logic particularly common to the lower orders of thinking beings.”

“So you’re saying, as a member of a ‘higher’ order, you’d prefer the universe to make no sense? That would explain this whole conversation.”

“I’m _saying,_ you are a tool,” the Director retorts, emphasizing each word. “Your unusual ability — your awareness — is valuable to me, combined as it is with your intellectual powers. The results of your research will be very valuable to my clients. But if you disobey me, if you turn in my hand the way tools too often do, I can destroy your sanity, and quite easily, too. What time is it right now?”

“What does that —”

“What _time is it right now,_ Carlos?”

He looks down at his watch. “4:43. Why? You want to know if you have time to stop and get ice cream on your way out of town?”

The Director’s laughter is even less sincere than his smile. “Oh, we won’t stay that long. My employees aren’t fond of the sun. Just one more thing,” and they’re turning smoothly again off Ouroboros Road and onto Seventh, and some of the constriction around Carlos’s heart eases with the realization that he’ll be able to get out of the car any minute now. “Be prompt about sending in your progress reports, all right? Physical punishment can be counterproductive... so I’ll take one of _them,_ if I find you’ve crossed my will. I might even make you choose.”

Carlos turns his head and looks at the mask of the Director’s face as they come to a stop. It’s like looking in a mirror to discover that some known landmark has become occluded beyond recognition. The terror field that has turned Night Vale into a town of statues is being held away from him somehow, he realizes; if the Director wanted him abject and screaming, he’d be on the floor of the sedan right now with no breath left in his lungs.

He abruptly clenches his fist around the smoldering butt of the cigarette, before he can think about what he’s doing. The sharp, familiar pain brings him back to himself.

“Do you know what a cliché is?” he asks the Director, when he’s able to speak again.

“I’ll look it up. In the meantime, do we have an agreement?”

Carlos opens the door of the sedan. No one stops him, but the light from outside is blinding. He says, “I thought we already did. I took your money, didn’t I?”

“You did. But you could still leave, give up on your project.”

“I won’t do that. I _wouldn’t_ have done that. You had no need to come here.”

“Ah, but you were already becoming curious, weren’t you? I had to underline for you that, in this case, your curiosity must remain unsatisfied. Send in your reports, stay in Night Vale, and do not question my clients’ instructions, and your friends will not be harmed. Now promise.”

Carlos hauls himself fully upright, holding his injured hand unthinkingly against his side. Stares down at the pavement until his sight begins to adjust again.

“I have no choice, do I? If I say no... now... what will you do?”

“You know what I’ll do,” the Director says. “I have been working on this project for far too long to let the ruin of one particular plan get in my way. And this is Night Vale; nobody would even question your sudden and unexplained deaths.”

 _Cecil would,_ Carlos thinks. _Cecil would question our deaths until the whole town was wondering._

_Or until they reeducated him, to make him go back to sports scores and weather forecasts._

He takes a breath. A dusty, parched, desert-hot breath, the edge of it tasting like ash from the burned office building.

He says, “I promise.”

The moment hangs in the air like exhaled smoke, and then the door closes quietly behind him and the black sedan ghosts away, back the way it came, back out to Route 800 to continue its journey north.

The tide of fear goes out with it, slowly, and leaves him shivering with reaction.

 

“Jesus Christ, boss, what just happened?”

He smiles at Eli’s anger. He’s about to fall over, and it’s heartening to see someone else angry.

“What _was_ that? Fucking talk to us!” Eli lets go of Marianne’s hand, darts forward, perhaps intending to shake him, and then catches him instead, with a grunt of surprise, as he staggers. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Well, a little. Just so I wouldn’t pass out.”

Marianne firmly takes hold of his wrist, before he can hide his burned hand in his pocket. “You’re putting a bandage on this. And then I’m getting food in you, somehow, if I have to hook you up to an IV.”

“Pizza might be easier,” he says, but he’s still smiling. Seeing them able to move again is a huge relief.

“Uh... Carlos?” Steve Carlsberg has shaken off the blanket, as if he can’t quite remember why he had it, and is approaching tentatively. “I want to help.”

Eli rolls his eyes. “Help? You? Weren’t you hiding under your desk the whole time?”

“Wait,” Carlos says. “I had a question to ask you, Steve. Where did the books come from? Do you know?”

Steve nods. “That’s why... I’m pretty sure it’s my fault,” he says, sighing. “They came from the Library, of course.”

 

“If we’re planning on breaking and entering, boss, should we really be talking it over in a restaurant?” Phil glances nervously over one shoulder at the chattering patrons of Big Rico’s, none of whom are paying any attention to the scientists’ usual corner table. It’s 5:30 by the big novelty clock on the wall, the hands glowing green in the dimness.

“Why not?” Carlos takes another bite of his pizza. He isn’t sure what makes bleeding mushrooms so addictive, but at least his tests have proved to his own satisfaction that they can’t feel pain — or anything at all, in fact. They might even qualify as vegetarian.

“Well, the Secret Police —”

“— are avoiding us. The six of us. Specifically. And possibly the fire chief, too, since he responded to Eli’s... uh... distress signal. Officer Ben called them off. On purpose. I think he’s hoping we _will_ break some rules, or at the very least get ourselves conveniently devoured.”

“How exactly do you get conveniently devoured? I mean, as opposed to _in_ conveniently devoured?” Eli is thoughtfully chewing the end of his straw. “It sounds like semantics, but I think it could be important, considering this is Night Vale.”

“Can we avoid the rabbit trails for right now, kid?” Dave frowns. “I just don’t like this. What happened earlier — everyone in town felt it, I think...”

“Yeah, strange, wasn’t it? How it vanished suddenly, like a mirage,” and Carlos takes a cautious sip of his orange milk. It doesn’t taste anything like normal milk, but it doesn’t taste bad, either.

The other scientists all glance from their food to each other, leaving a conversational gap for Steve to take advantage of. “You’re positive we’re... not under surveillance?” He sounds rather stunned.

“Oh, the minimum. Security cameras, of course,” Carlos says. “But the ones here at Big Rico’s aren’t very reliable, at least, not while we’re around. Entirely coincidental, I’m sure.”

“Ten points if you can actually make him faint, boss,” offers Eli, grinning at the look of astonishment on Steve’s face.

Marianne crosses her arms on the table. “Agh, you’re all making me feel like I’m babysitting five incredibly _difficult_ little boys. Phil, stop flapping. Carlos, more than five bites, please, or I’ll make good my threats. Eli, just _don’t._ Steve, go ahead and tell us how you think you can help.”

“Well, I — I just meant, if you needed muscle?” Hopefully. “Those things scared me to fucking death, but I — Gina was my coworker, okay, she was a good friend. She didn’t deserve to go like that. And you guys, you’re, uh, you’re tougher than I thought you were, maybe you don’t need me. But nobody’s _doing_ anything — I mean, nobody in _charge_ is doing anything — and I don’t want her death to be just one more unexplained statistic. You understand, right?” turning from Marianne’s unimpressed face to look at Carlos, pleadingly.

“Yeah. I understand. Well, it is the logical next step, anyway... we need to get into the Library.”

“Does this mean you’ll eventually change your mind about capturing one of those hooded figures?”

“No, Eli, it does not.”

“What if the hooded figures make some sort of a concerted effort to take over the town and we _have_ to capture one, in order to find out how to threaten the others?”

Dave chuckles. “You’re putting way too much thought into that.”

“I’m _curious,”_ the intern grumbles, but goes back to chewing on his straw.

“I still think they’re just people in robes. Occam’s razor. And this is another rabbit trail,” Phil points out.

“I’ll help you — break into — the Library if you think that’s the way to stop it,” Steve says, “but how are we going to do it? I mean, there’s no door.”

“No,” agrees Carlos, “but we don’t need a door. We just need _you,_ Steve.”

 

“This,” says Phil, “is the craziest plan you’ve ever come up with, boss.”

Carlos is uneasily certain that his senior staff member is probably right, but running a proper comparison would take so much explaining that he decides to remain silent for the moment. Goes back to rewinding the bandage around his hand, tying off the end carefully.

“Earlier today you said you thought people trying to control paranormal forces were being delusional, and now you’re running this whole experiment on the assumption that it’s going to work,” Dave adds. “I wish, if you’re going to do this, that you’d at least let Phil or me go in for you —”

Flatly, “No. I’m not sending someone else into a perilous situation in my own place.”

“You’re sending Carlsberg in,” Phil argues, pointing at the door of the bathroom, where they had hastily sent Steve — ostensibly to clean the blood from his face — so that they could have a few minutes of privacy.

“That’s different. He’s a Night Vale native, and he’s the only one who’s ever done this before. I think if we tried to go without him, it wouldn’t work.”

“You _think,”_ scornfully. “You _guess.”_

“All right, I guess. Find a couple of pillows, will you? I think there’s at least one left in that cupboard, from when I was sleeping here.”

“This is lunacy,” Phil says, but he stands up and opens the cupboard door.

“Actually, there’s precedent.” Eli, unsurprisingly, is the calmest member of the group at the moment. He’s leaning against the edge of the table, twirling his keychain around one finger, eyes fixed on some theoretical point in space. “That one government study, the one they did out in the middle of nowhere in Washington — what was it called, boss? From 1991, ’92?”

“Blue Rose,” Carlos says. “I remember.”

“Didn’t some FBI agent fucking _disappear_ during that project?” Phil brandishes a pillow as though ready to suffocate someone with it. “That wasn’t real astral travel. That was some kind of cover-up.”

“It was both, I think,” Eli says quietly, “and yes, actually _several_ FBI agents disappeared. I guess we’re glad we’re not working for the government. Are we?”

Carlos rubs his eyes. “Later, Hirsch, later.”

“We’re not really going to have to try to hypnotize the two of you, are we?” Marianne is smiling uneasily. “Because even if I could remember everything I read about Project Blue Rose, we don’t have a license for that, and yes, before you ask, you _can_ get arrested here without one.”

“No hypnotism, just chemistry.”

“Antihistamines, you think?” Dave frowns. “They’d take too long to kick in.”

Carlos leans over, props his elbows on his knees. “Look in my bag, the inner pocket, on the right.”

Dave picks up the bag, rummages around in it curiously just as Steve comes back out into the lab, rubbing his face with a towel. Phil leans over his colleague’s shoulder, grimaces. “What is it?”

“Prescription stuff. Halcion. I hope you _have_ the prescription,” Dave says, handing the foil packet to Carlos.

He smiles at them, wearily. “What, did you think I stole it?”

“The thought did cross my mind for half a second.”

“Unworthy,” says Eli, amused. “The boss here’s been an insomniac since he was a kid... isn’t that right?”

“You are a contemptible little snoop,” Marianne informs him.

“Thank you, I’ll be here all evening,” the intern bows. “Don’t try the veal. In fact, don’t think too hard about the veal, we don’t know where it’s been.”

“Veal?” Steve looks confused, trying to follow the thread of the conversation he’s walked into the middle of. “Veal’s been banned by the City Council. Along with turducken. ‘No more foods that sound like part of a standup comedy routine — standup comedy routines are _not even a thing.’_ At least, I _think_ that was what that pamphlet said.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” laughs Eli.

“Steve,” Carlos interrupts, thumbing out one of the pills, “can you fall asleep sitting up?”

“Um. Maybe? Why?”

“Because,” Phil says, crossing his arms, “we might need to wake you up in a hurry, and if cold water and yelling doesn’t work, that means it’s bucket time.” He sets a plastic pail next to the empty chair.

“Wait, you mean — I’d have to take one of those pills too?” Steve looks uneasy. “I don’t know —”

“Too late to un-volunteer yourself now,” Marianne says, not without satisfaction. “Unless you think you can fall asleep in under ten minutes _without_ chemical help, yes, you have to take one of those pills too.”

Steve reluctantly sits down. “Okay, I guess, uh — how is this going to work?”

“Hang on to me,” Carlos says. Winces at the sudden, panicky pressure of the other man’s fingers. “My wrist, maybe, not my hand.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right. Here. You don’t have heart or liver problems, do you? Seizures, any other medical conditions at all?”

“No, no, I’m healthy as a two-headed horse. I played football in high school...”

“You need water to take it with?” Dave asks. “Or a pillow?”

“No, I’m okay.” Steve shakes his head, then quickly swallows the small blue tablet, as if getting rid of condemning evidence.

It’s easy to imagine him as an athlete, really: just erase the sideburns and the slight beer gut, the lines around his eyes. He’s still got the muscular build, probably still had it in college underneath the trappings of a premature adulthood. What moment, Carlos wonders, started his unexpected trajectory from naive school jock to office-bound conspiracy theorist?

But he knows the answer already, of course: it must have been a death.

It makes him feel almost sympathetic.

“Hey, boss.” Eli, leaning forward, snapping his fingers. “You’re getting sleepy. You got any more instructions for us before you pass out?”

“Yeah. Set the timer now. It’s... what, 6:26? Pull us out in exactly twenty minutes. And don’t forget to keep taking readings. Even if nothing happens, keep hitting _enter_ until the experiment’s over. Okay... Steve, what do you do when you go to the Library, normally?”

“Not sure, really. Think about books, I guess... just wonder...”

He puts his free hand on Steve’s shoulder, shakes him a little, and Steve swings around to look at him, fingers tightening painfully on his wrist.

“Is this scaring you?” he asks, gently.

“Yes,” Steve says. “The Library isn’t... safe.”

“Have you done this before? Gone with another person?”

“No.”

“Well, I need you to fix your mind on it. Think about the Library, think about waking up there. When you close your eyes, imagine you’re walking toward it. Walking toward it and taking me with you.” He sinks his voice, calmly, deliberately. “Do it now. Close your eyes.”

“You —” Steve’s jaw unhinges in a yawn, but he closes his eyes, obedient, leans against Carlos. “You’re really bossy... for a scientist.”

“Yeah, so I’ve been informed.”

“Cecil Palmer’s... gonna kill me if he... ever finds out about this.” Another yawn.

That’s below the belt. Carlos can’t quite roll his eyes — his eyelids are too heavy — but he manages to burlesque it, for the benefit of the other scientists. He wishes it were Cecil in Steve’s place. Cecil’s weight on his side now instead of this near-stranger’s. Cecil about to take him into the darkness. As it should be.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says aloud. “Think about the Library. Just books. Nothing to be afraid of,” and he thinks, _Do not fear._

Shivers.

 

Here’s a small, unpleasant memory, rising up on the edge of unconsciousness as it swallows him whole: the office of the psychiatrist who’d given him the drugs. The last person that he thoroughly and completely lied to.

“It’s a little unusual that you went to the sleep center _first,”_ the psychiatrist says, shuffling through all the paperwork he handed her.

“Unusual as in bad?”

She smiles. A professional, automatic smile, but not an unfriendly one. “No, just unusual. We’re generally the first point of contact, and then we refer patients there.”

“Oh, my doctor recommended it.” That was true, at least, but he hadn’t gone. Hadn’t wanted them to even observe a map of his brain waves, let alone overhear what he might say, in his sleep. Bleeding halls and eyeless children and hidden cameras, scraps of sentences in languages he doesn’t even speak. He wants sleeping pills, not antipsychotics.

“Do you think it’s related to job stress? You’ve been working hard, according to this... that gives me some concern.”

He sighs a little, with relief; she’s bought it, she isn’t even stopping to examine the charts, just glancing through them. “It very well could be. I’m leaving for my new position, soon, and it’s a little out of the way. Don’t you need to be in therapy for these drugs?”

“Not necessarily, but I can give you a referral,” she says, writing on a form now. “And, of course, the one prescription won’t last long without a doctor to renew it, so you’d better get in touch with someone out there in... Night Vale, is it? I’ve never heard of it, is it nice?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

 _Not awake,_ he adds mentally.

 

“Carlos? Carlos, wake up. We did it. Carlos?”

He puts his wrist over his eyes, groans. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, “but that happened _really_ fast.”

Carlos opens his eyes cautiously. He’s lying on his back on some kind of rough, institutional carpet, his burned hand is throbbing, and there are huge drifts of yellowed paper like fallen leaves all around him.

His first thought: _I’ve never seen skylights with bars on them before._

His second: _Danger._

He’s up and on his feet in an instant, pulling Steve into the shadow of a nearby pile of books. The other man’s astonishment helps; they’re about the same height, but Steve is easily more than half again as heavy as Carlos is, and if he’d had time to think about resisting, even reflexively, it might have been too late.

“What is —”

Carlos just puts his hand over Steve’s mouth. Looks at him: _Hold still. Hold very still._

It passes by them in a chittering, heavy rustle, wrapped in shadows. Sharp teeth, talons, white pupilless eyes framed by an incongruous pair of red cat’s-eye spectacles. Carlos sees it without turning his head, a clear mental image that makes him want to scream.

Screaming, he’s certain, would be an _extremely_ bad idea.

It’s making a sound like it’s stepping on broken glass the whole way down the aisle, drawn-out and piercing. Listening to this unnatural screech until it dies away in the distance, Carlos runs it back in his head and realizes it’s a list of very specific Dewey Decimal classification numbers. He’s not sure he wants to know what -500.2+193>8 means. He didn’t even know there _were_ negative categories in the Dewey Decimal system.

“Librarian?” he asks, in an undervoice, letting go of Steve.

“Yeah... librarian,” Steve husks.

“Wish I’d thought to bring one of the paranormal energy field readers with me —” Carlos stops, looks down at him in astonishment. “How the fuck did you change into pajamas without anyone noticing? You were wearing normal clothing when we passed out.”

Steve looks sheepish. “It’s a _dream,_ Carlos, you don’t really get to control what you’re wearing. Just be glad neither of us ended up naked.”

“Hideous thought,” agrees Carlos. “No pockets,” and he immediately begins hunting through his, fascinated, to see if any of the objects he normally carries have been left behind. None of them have — but there is an _extra_ object there. A folded piece of paper.

He knows what it is the moment he touches it. Closes his eyes. _Damn_ his subconscious mind.

“Um. If I die in here, promise me you won’t look in my left coat pocket? My knife’s here, anyway,” and he pulls it out, unfolds it, reassured by the grip of its metal handle.

Steve shakes his head. “You’re kind of a badass motherfucker, has anyone ever told you that?”

Carlos tries to stifle his laughter at this. Leans against the shelf. “No,” he manages, as it spills softly out of his throat, a series of tiny chuckles, shakes, catches of breath. “No, no, mostly people... just tell me I’m crazy.”

“That too,” solemnly. “Your left pocket, you said?”

“Yes.” He presses his wrist to his mouth, with an attempt at calm.

“Okay. I promise I won’t look, if it makes you feel any better. Honestly, though, if you died and left me here, I’d just run like hell.”

“Run like hell and then _hide,”_ Carlos says. “Hide and wait for them to wake you up. They will, even if I’m gone.”

“But you’re not going to die. Right?” Barefoot and anxious, Steve almost does look young enough to be a frightened high school student, out past curfew and caught up in some disastrous prank. It makes the resumption of authority easier for Carlos, somehow. He’s not sure why.

“It’s not in the plan,” he says, in what he hopes is a reassuring tone. “Now, remember, I’m from out of town, so... give me the whole nickel tour, all right? I want to see all the sights. Especially what you saw when you were here this morning. When you picked up those books.”

 

There’s a faint tune playing over the Library’s ancient sound system, but it’s so buried in crackle and distortion that it takes Carlos a while to work out that it’s a country music song. It would probably be pretty, in a simple way, if it didn’t keep spawning repetitive pieces of itself — just a man’s voice and an acoustic guitar. The sort of thing he associates with grocery stores or doctor’s office waits, not the halls of academe.

Not that this place isn’t, in itself, a distorted, broken-up image of those halls.

It’s only supposed to take up one city block. Carlos knows that because he’s seen it from the outside — prowled all the way around it, puzzled by the heavy, padlocked bars on all the windows. The ancient black iron fence. The aura it emanated. He could easily have climbed the fence, charmed one of those padlocks, if he hadn’t been positive it was impossible to avoid being caught in the act. Old Town is the most heavily surveilled part of Night Vale.

That, and the lack of a door had made him deeply uneasy.

He’s not any less uneasy now.

The ceilings are highly vaulted and seem improbably far away; the stacks loom in massive shadowed aisles until they disappear into complete darkness; the cheap gray carpet is bloodstained in some places, worn through in others; and at the edges of Carlos’s vision things seem to bow outward or warp in strange ways, although whatever he focuses on is clear and sharp.

He’s moving easily enough, but he can still feel the weight of the Halcion dose. He is no longer ignorant enough of the secrets of Night Vale to believe that the chemicals are causing the non-Euclidean tricks of the geography around him, however.

“I can’t quite remember,” Steve mutters. “I think I went this way... but usually it isn’t this clear. You feel like you’re dreaming, like you’re not really here, but... the ground feels real. I hear your footsteps. I could _smell_ that librarian.”

“Agh, don’t remind me.”

 _“You_ must be doing this, Carlos,” and Steve glances back curiously at him.

“What do you mean? We’re both dreaming. Or on the astral plane, if you like that better. There’s no proper term for it yet, until I invent one, I suppose.”

“But you’re... like, the most _solid_ thing in here —” Steve stops, his eyes widening, as Carlos picks up a book from another of the huge, overflowing piles. “Don’t open it, are you crazy?”

“Yeah. I just warned you about that, remember?” Carlos flips the book open, sending a cloud of yellow-scented dust up into the air between them, and nothing happens.

“So it isn’t... it isn’t all of them,” Steve says.

“Guess not.” Carlos turns over another book on the pile. Just to be certain, he opens this book too, then sets it down again. “No, it’s obviously specific books. I theorize something is — making them like traps, instilling some sort of will or appetite into them. And whatever that something is, it’s in here.”

Steve glances nervously around. “You think the librarians are doing it?”

“I don’t know. What do you know about librarians? Are they — were they ever — people?”

“Oh, Masters of us all, _that’s_ a horrible idea!” Steve winces. Then jumps, as a sound becomes audible beyond the end of the aisle.

The sound of slowly tearing paper.

 

They both expect a corpse when they peer out into the reception area. Carlos braces for it, knife in hand, but this is apparently a day for expectations to behave like a house of cards — standing tall through shocks and slamming doors, and then falling at a breath of wind.

What they find is not a body, although at first its elongated, rectangular shape makes Carlos think of a coffin.

It’s some kind of machine.

It’s large, streamlined, metallic, and painted a cheery shade of yellow. Red lights flicker in a row down its side. There’s a long black slot at the top, from which smoke or steam of some kind is rising, and the sound is issuing from somewhere inside it.

“What the _hell_ is that?” Steve whispers.

A book pops up from the slot, for all the world like a piece of toast, and the red lights flash sun-colored and brilliant for a moment, and then go back to their sullen flickering.

 _“Proof,”_ says Carlos. “That’s what it is. I don’t know how it got in here, or why it’s not attracting librarians, but it’s what’s making those books.”

Steve looks around at Carlos. “You’re going to try to take it back with us, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am.” He stands up, approaches it cautiously, walking a circle around it. On the other side is a stenciled logo — simple, somehow familiar, and ominous: an orange triangle enclosing a stylized capital letter S. There are books lying in a pile next to it, hissing.

“How?” Steve wails under his breath. “We’re _dreaming.”_

“You brought the books back from your dream. They’re physical objects. Conjunction of the physical and the paranormal, which is, in fact, what we must be right now ourselves, our bodies, I mean. We’re _here_ but not here. And the machine has to incorporate some sort of paranormal element.”

“How are you going to hold onto it while it’s... doing that? Those books will eat your... your everything off... before you can blink!”

“Not if I don’t activate them. Open them, I mean, or touch them...”

“But the machine? It looks like it’ll electrocute you!”

“There’s got to be an _off_ switch.”

“No there doesn’t! Are there _off_ switches on _bombs?”_

“Yes, of course there are,” absently, pulling a pencil out of his pocket. “Well, it’s more complicated than that, but you don’t build something like this without a failsafe.”

“Carlos, it’s some kind of secret government technology, do you think whoever put it here left an instruction manual lying around? Don’t be an _idiot_ —” He breaks off with another suppressed wail of terror as Carlos kneels down next to the machine. “Have you had that pencil with you the whole time?”

“Yes. Be quiet, do you want to attract another librarian?”

Steve moans, but stuffs his sleeve into his mouth. Carlos doesn’t look at him; he has become secondary.

 _This,_ this chuntering metal enigma, _this_ is the first thing he’s really been able to get close to that he might be able to study properly. Take apart, put back together, analyze, diagram, _explain._ It might give him a fingerhold on the cliff edge of trying to understand how Night Vale _works._

He’s shaking, with excitement and with the strain of keeping his muscles taut under the growing numbness of the Halcion, but he narrows his focus down to his hand and the pencil in it. Touches the metal side of the thing, lightly. Nothing happens.

Emboldened, he reaches out and brushes it with the tips of his fingers. It’s warm, vibrating with some kind of mechanical activity, he can almost isolate the patterns in it —

— and he can’t move his hand.

On the surface of the machine, close to where the foot would be if it were a coffin (and now that his panicked mind has seized on that image again, it won’t go away), a screen that he is positive was not there before abruptly materializes.

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT DETECTED

it states, and then,

PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSWORD

Experimentally, he takes a breath, opens his mouth. Tries to shift in place, but the paralysis appears to be creeping up toward his shoulder. Shit.

“Carlos? What’s wrong?” Steve is covering most of his face with his hands now.

PASSWORD INCORRECT

Carlos shakes his head at Steve, puts the finger of his free hand to his lips. _Shut up._ Takes another quiet breath.

What the hell, if he’s going to die, he might as well play his one card.

“Mirage,” he says.

 

The little screen goes dark.

His heart leaps, but he is not released.

The invisible but strong grip on his arm and shoulder intensifies, goes ice-cold, and an alert starts pinging somewhere inside the machine. _“Emergency self-destruct initiated,”_ a serene, recorded female voice informs him. _“Please remove all essential material to a distance of ten meters or farther.”_

Steve’s eyes are completely round. He looks from Carlos to the fallen pencil to the lights on the machine, now stuttering frantically. “What — what have you _done?”_

“What I always figured I’d do, someday. I just didn’t expect it to be today.”

_“Repeat, please remove all essential material —”_

“Ten meters or farther, you heard it. Get your ass out of here,” Carlos snaps.

“Carlos —”

 _“Run,_ damn you, _run like hell!”_

Steve’s jaw drops, and then he obeys, disappearing at startling speed into the stacks again.

_“Final warning. Emergency self-destruct initiated —”_

Veils of darkness are beginning to drop over his vision.

Carlos hangs his head. Chokes on something that might be a laugh or a sob. Reaches clumsily across his body with his free hand, to pull Cecil’s note out of the left pocket of his labcoat. So what if it’s not really here, if his mind created it? He can still _see_ it — if dimly — and he doesn’t want to die with his eyes closed.

“Cecil,” he says, only half-aware he’s still speaking aloud, “it’s my fault, isn’t it, for dreaming without you? Now I won’t hear you say good night — tonight, but — but even if you never knew I — it — it’s been — an honor,” the last in a whisper.

And then it’s all darkness, and the bitter cold beginning to encircle his shoulders now, and the chemical weight of the Halcion to pull him down, like irrefutable gravity.

 

The light, when it comes, almost stabs him, and he recoils, thinking that here is the explosion he’s been waiting for — as if jerking his body away a few centimeters could in any way protect him from a huge concussive force.

“Stop _squirming,_ boss. Jesus,” Eli says. “It’s only me. Knew this pillow would come in handy.”

“Take that flashlight away again, you probably scared him half to death.” Steve, rough with the aftermath of fright.

“Hey, man, you don’t give the orders here,” the intern says, but the painfully bright light moves away. Carlos swallows hard, and then promptly wishes he hadn’t — the inside of his mouth tastes like blood and bile.

“Say something.” Dave. A hand on his arm, now, and two more on his shoulders; he opens his eyes to a circle of concerned faces and sighs with relief.

“Boss?” Marianne’s fingers relax a little when he focuses on her.

“You were right,” he says, croaking out the words in a rusty whisper. He touches Marianne’s shoulder, then looks up at Phil. “That _was_ the craziest plan I ever came up with.”

“Well, maybe you’ll listen to me next time,” Phil says, but his eyes are suspiciously bright.

He tries to smile. “Maybe I will.”

 

8:02.

Sunset, turning the sky to rose and violet. The street outside, the smell of sagebrush, the twilit sounds of his inexplicable and baffling and already beloved new home.

Phil and Eli, for once in accord, can be heard from inside the open door, convincing Steve to stay lying down on the sofa in the lab, bombarding him with questions. Dave sits on the trunk of the Prius, methodically going over the readings he’s taken. Marianne, who doesn’t seem to be convinced that Carlos can be trusted to stand up on his own, has not removed her supportive arm for longer than ten minutes at a time since he first regained his feet.

“So,” Dave says, “you think we’ve done enough saving the world for the day?”

“Hell, this’ll do me for the week,” and Carlos tips his face up into the wind.

“No it won’t,” and Marianne laughs. “Something will happen before your seven days are up and you’ll go charging off again like a crusading knight. I’ll put money on it.”

“Hey, both my hands are burned now. They’re not serious or anything, but at the moment, three minutes of holding a broadsword and I’d be done.”

“Hey, boss,” calls Eli, sticking his head out the door, “can we have the day off tomorrow?”

“Only if you promise not to drunk-dial me in the middle of the night again,” Carlos grins. “I want some undisturbed sleep.”

Marianne hugs him, smiling back, but Dave looks grave. He slides down off the trunk and comes over, holding out the reader so that Carlos can see the projection. “You’d better take a look at this.”

“That’s — beautiful,” Carlos says, and it is. The shapes of the paranormal energy fields on the screen are exactly the shapes of the sleepers’ bodies: himself and Steve, there and not there at the same time.

“Yeah. But I meant _this,”_ and Dave presses the button to send it into slow fast-forward, and Carlos watches his recorded image with a growing sense of unreality as it flares, brightens almost unbearably. When Dave stops the playback, the field around Steve is almost insubstantial in comparison.

“How — God, what _rating_ is that?”

“11.38, at the highest point, right here.” Softly.

“I, um.” He laughs, uneasily. “Look at examples, will you? What have we measured that’s — higher?”

“I have been looking. Only three things. Whatever you recorded in the radio station, the entrance to the dog park... and the Glow Cloud.”

“You’re saying —” Marianne’s voice has gone soft, too.

“I’m saying,” Dave continues, “that in our first experiment that involved attempting to access and control the force of paranormal energy, we measured that force affecting you to a very significant degree... or _you,_ Carlos, affecting _it.”_

Marianne steps back, keeping only her hand on Carlos’s shoulder. “Did you _know?”_ she demands suddenly. “Did you _know_ you could do that?”

“I didn’t...” He looks from her face to Dave’s, shakes his head, conscious of a renewed feeling of shame. “I didn’t have... independent evidence. No.”

“You’re... Carlos, you’re...”

 _A person,_ the memory of Josie’s voice finishes crisply in his head, before he can say any of the ugly words that come to his tongue.

“Amazing,” Dave says, finally.

 

He opens all the windows in his new apartment, walking barefoot in the darkness.

 _Now if all the closets fly open in the night again, they’ll match,_ he thinks with a sidelong smile.

The iPad trundles inquisitively after him, crawls up onto the foot of the bed, but for the first time, Carlos is too exhausted to play the day’s recording of Cecil’s show. He pulls an AA battery out of one of the pockets of the nearest suitcase and tosses it onto the floor for the living tablet to chase — oddly like feeding a cat, he thinks, as the tiny grinding and crunching sounds begin.

He closes his eyes, opens his ears, lets Night Vale sink into him like water into cloth, like medicine.

He’ll listen to Cecil tomorrow, he tells himself. When his head is clear again.

When he’s reassured himself that the Voice will come back to his dreams.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The portrayal of librarians in this episode comes from my own favorite Night Vale fanfic, _[How I Survived My Summer Vacation, by Tamika Flynn, Age 12 3/4](http://archiveofourown.org/works/914801)_ , by [thingswithwings](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/pseuds/thingswithwings). If you read any other fic, read that one — it's excellent.
> 
> The name of Carlos's sponsoring university may be Lovecraftian, but it was borrowed by way of Caitlín R. Kiernan's unmatchable universe. All hail!
> 
> The little coffee shop, Brewed Awakenings, was named for [this lovely piece of art](http://turnitonandhide.tumblr.com/post/60840201627/annethecatdetective-edgebug-brewed) (and Abby is undoubtedly correct about the effect of the research team's patronage).
> 
> And yes, the _Twin Peaks_ reference is quite intentional.  <3


End file.
